Summer 2020 Handmade Jewelry
Cute Black Cats
Here are some cute black cat earrings for Halloween.
Recharge And Get Inspired
Marie Antoinette and I will be going to Corsica to gather more sea glass and to recharge. Corsica is Marie’s native home and she is looking for renewed inspiration from the sea, the mountains, and the fresh air.
This photo was a finalist in Landscape Photography Magazine’s Picture Of The Month competition.
I always enjoy going to take more beautiful photographs of this rustic island. I will journal my photography trips as time permits over on my fine art photography website in my first post called Discovering the UN-Familiar. Follow along and subscribe.
Jewelry Changes – Website Changes – Design Challenges
Mare Antoinette has been making a lot of changes to her jewelry designs over the years. Like her jewelry, her website has also been evolving so I felt it was time for another update. The blog and static website are now using one contiguous design and it is now mobile friendly. This should provide you, her wonderful customers and visitors, a better user experience no matter what type of device you are using.
The website now uses WordPress in its’ entirety but that doesn’t mean it took any less time to develop. Many people think that if they have a WordPress site, it is just a simple task to put up and you’re done but once they get into it, they realize that web pages need to be optimized so they can be found, menus need to be in certain order, plugins need to selected and tested (and tested again), images and graphics created etc. In fact, while the main architecture may be completed in an instant by selecting a new theme, it doesn’t really save any time because you end up putting more effort in to other aspects.
I think that any creative process works that way; where we once struggled to create a technique becomes automated, we then see the problems that were once hidden by it and we end up fixing them manually until they become automated and we see another problem. I see this all the time as someone who uses Photoshop. I buy books, take webinars and learn how to do a special technique and then Adobe or a third party plug-in developer makes a filter that does the same thing in a click. Then that frees me up to find other problems I hadn’t seen.
Do you have this issue as well? As long as it makes it better in the end, whatever “it” is, that’s all that matters. Enjoy.
Broken Necklace To Get New Life
My wife, (jewelry designer Marie Gilvey) had a pleasant surprise arrive in our mailbox the other day. It was a broken necklace from a repeat customer. Marie Antoinette was delighted to receive the necklace and began to look it over for problems.
The first thing she does is look over all of the pieces to check for issues such as:
- how many loose parts there are
- existing flaws such as scratches and cracks
- the type of wire used to hold the necklace together
- they type of clasp
- any obvious missing parts
The next step in this jewelry repair is to decide if it would be better to repair it or redesign it. It was a very nice necklace and Marie Antoinette felt it would be better to restore it. The clasps were both missing some parts and the wire was pretty brittle. Below are photos of the current state of the broken necklace; click any image for an enlargement. In my next post, we’ll take a look at the final repair.
Follow Marie Antoinette on our Facebook Fan page for updates on this project.
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